Marin judge sends Joseph Naso to death row for murders of six women

Calling him "an evil and disturbed man," a Marin County judge sentenced convicted serial killer Joseph Naso to death Friday for the murders of six women over a span of nearly two decades.

Judge Andrew Sweet said the evidence proved that Naso inflicted "abhorrent and repugnant levels of suffering and cruelty" on the victims, and humilitated them even more by meticulously documenting the crimes in his diaries and photographs.

"You being in this world, Mr. Naso, has made this world a worse place," Sweet said.

Naso, who turns 80 in January, insisted that the prosecution had not proved its case, that the DNA evidence was "planted," that he was the victim of media bias, and that District Attorney Edward Berberian took the case to score political points in Marin.

"This was kind of like a hate crime against me," he said.

Naso also objected to the presence of a news photographer at the hearing. When the judge overruled the objection, Naso initially tried to shield his face with paper, then stood and saluted the photographer with sarcastic formality. Then he gave the cameraman the middle finger.

The case broke open in 2010, when authorities conducted a routine probation search at Naso's home in Reno. Naso retired there after spending much of his career as a nomadic photographer and property manager in Oakland, San Francisco and rural Northern California.

The probation check revealed piles of incriminating writings and photographs, including a diary that documented a half century of rapes and sex crimes. The search also turned up what authorities describe as a "list of 10" — a roster, in Naso's handwriting, of 10 unnamed women with geographic locations.

Authorities concluded that the list referred to 10 women Naso killed and the areas where he dumped their bodies. Investigators were able to identity six women on the list, but four others remain unnamed and unaccounted for.

Authorities said four of the known victims were prostitutes Naso picked up, strangled to death and discarded along rural roads. Roxene Roggasch, an 18-year-old San Jose native, was found west of Fairfax in 1977; Carmen Colon, 22, was found near Port Costa in 1978; Pamela Parsons, 38, was found in Yuba County in 1993; and Tracy Tafoya, 31, was found in Yuba County in 1994.

Technically, prosecutors only sought the death penalty for the murders of Colon, Parsons and Tafoya, because capital punishment was suspended in 1977, when Roggasch was killed. But the judge and jury could weigh the totality of the evidence in determining the death verdicts.

To support their case for the death penalty, prosecutors Dori Ahana and Rosemary Slote introduced evidence that Naso also killed two other women: Sharileea Patton, whose body washed up in Tiburon in 1981, and Sara Dylan, a nomadic Bob Dylan groupie who was killed in 1992 in or near Nevada County. The prosecution did not have all the evidence in place to charge Naso with those two murders in time for his trial.

Prosecutors also produced evidence implicating Naso in the sexual assaults of four other women, including his ex-wife.

Naso, unwilling to spend his estimated $1 million in assets on lawyers, represented himself at the trial. A public defender, Pedro Oliveros, was assigned as "advisory counsel" to provide limited assistance.

The sentencing in Marin Superior Court drew a courtroom audience full of prosecutors, investigators from California and Nevada, residents who served on the Naso jury, and family members of the victims.

Family members said they wished Naso would live a long life of suffering and solitude at San Quentin State Prison.

"We lost the ability to have love from a mother," Rachael Smith, one of Carmen Colon's daughters, told the judge. "I don't want him to die. I want him to sit there alone. I want him to feel what it's like to lose everything."

Shane Ashby, son of Roxene Roggasch, said Naso "robbed me of a childhood and a mother." Then he spoke directly to Naso.

"I hope you live to be 110 years old," he said.

When the judge asked Naso for any final remarks before the pronouncement of the sentence, Naso complained that he should not have to pay any restitution. He said he already paid into victim restituition funds when he was a California taxpayer.

"If anyone gets restitution in this case, it should be me," he said. "I shouldn't have been arrested, I shouldn't have been charged. ... I lost everything."

The last death sentence by a Marin jury was in 1990, when San Quentin inmate Jarvis Masters was condemned for the murder of a prison guard. Masters is still waiting for the sentence to be carried out.

The state has more than 700 inmates on death row. California has not executed a condemned inmate since 2006, when a federal judge ruled that the state's lethal injection procedure violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.